


Old Wounds

by ewolfe



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: A few months Post-MGSV, Past Child Abuse, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Bond, Skullface is there in a flashback, They're just getting to know each other, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 05:32:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11662626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ewolfe/pseuds/ewolfe
Summary: Eli sees his companion's face for the first time.Both children's vulnerabilities are laid bare.





	Old Wounds

For the first time in his life, Eli was aimless.

He and his floating companion had been wandering without direction for almost two full months now, since their defeat on the island. Eli slowly boiled over in frustration as he mulled through his options. His father was far beyond out of reach. Even with his newfound companion's abilities, the concept of another revenge plot was little more than a desperate fantasy. As far as Big Boss knew, his unwanted son was dead, remains mingling with the ashes of his own failure.

Perhaps someday, his supposed death on that island would work to his advantage. But for right now, their only realistic goal was to survive.

For the past several days, the two had made their home in some run down shack on the property of an abandoned farm, tucked in the outskirts of a small town. It had clearly seen some recent use, perhaps from other vagrants. Old beer bottles and other human debris littered the floor, broken glass and rusty nails combined to make a hazardous sleeping ground. It would do, for now.

On this particular evening, the two had ventured into the town for supplies. It was pathetically easy to steal whatever they needed with a psychic on his side. No need for weapons or threats when Tretij could simply make anyone nearby look the other way as he and Eli grabbed as much as they could carry. If there was anything that felt like a fighting chance at a future, it was the way he was so untouchable now, with Tretij. Though they had failed with Tretij exhausted from controlling the robot, without that burden he was more than capable of keeping the two of them out of harm's way. There was a thrill in sneaking through the streets on borrowed powers, without anyone able to so much as lift a finger against them.

 Tretij set himself down heavily outside their temporary home, accompanied by the crinkling of dozens of gas station snacks that dropped with him. He rubbed his forehead with one small hand. Eli felt the throb of the other boy's headache over their link.

"You need to eat something. That's probably why your headaches are so bad." He kicked a pack of snack nuts in Tretij's direction.

The boy looked up at him with narrowed eyes.

"What, are you allergic?"

"Allergic." The boy softly repeated. Of course he didn't know what that meant.

"Oh whatever. Just-" Eli picked up a sandwich from their haul. "Get something in your stomach. I'm getting _your_ headache too."

Tretij let out a huff before telekinetically grabbing the sandwich out of Eli's hands and floating up and out of sight with it. He never ate or drank in front of Eli, and knowing him, that would be the last he would see of him that night.

Eli ate his junk food meal in silence, left horribly alone with his thoughts. He went through the inevitable nightly self-torture session of mulling through equally useless options, before finally giving up on accomplishing anything else that night and retreating into the shack to attempt to find some sleep.

 

* * *

  
  
Eli jolted awake. _Something_ had moved nearby. Adrenaline and years of practice had him upright and pointing his knife into space long before his thoughts caught up with his body. He cursed under his breath, narrowed eyes darting around the empty shack for any sign of a threat.

No hostiles were in sight. Nothing so much as stirred. No sound split the night air, aside from a familiar, slow, filtered breathing.

Tretij was curled up on the ground nearby, most of his torso hidden under the straightjacket he now used like a blanket. One of his legs had kicked out in his sleep, his bare foot now the obvious culprit for what had awoken Eli.  
  
Eli scoffed at the sight, sheathing his blade. This was a novel situation. Though Tretij had slept nearby in the mouth of Sahelanthropus months before, (unconscious for almost a day after the exertion of carrying the mech for miles), he had made himself scarce at night since then. He seemed to prefer to sleep in trees or any other high surface he could find instead, mentally assuring Eli that he used this position to keep watch from above.

Now, for reasons unknown, he had opted instead to join his companion on the ground.

As far as he could tell, Tretij was still sound asleep, unbothered by Eli's moment of panic. Perhaps the psychic wasn't as watchful as he had hoped. Then again, he _had_ seemed exhausted at the end of the day. _Maybe he's recharging_ , Eli mused as he nudged the other boy's foot out of his sleeping space.  
  
With his adrenaline high being eaten away by returning drowsiness, Eli took a closer look at the sleeping boy. With a small start, he dimly registered that Tretij's mask was slightly loosened. One of the straps was unbuckled, as if he dropped off to sleep without being bothered to fix it after eating. Without the support of the strap, the muzzle of the mask had caught on a stray floorboard and was pushed up his face, moving almost imperceptibly up and down with the boy's steady breathing. Beneath the rim of the mask, what appeared to be the darkened corner of some wound or scar on the boy's face had been uncovered.  
  
At another time, he may have chided himself for this childish curiosity. But now he felt himself be carried, dreamlike, by the warm night air to kneel beside his sleeping companion. Emboldened by his returning drowsiness, Eli reached for the muzzle.

Tretij's breath caught as his fingers clumsily made contact, but his eyes remained closed. As delicately as he could muster, Eli pulled the mask up and away from the boy's face. The dark mark he had seen was indeed a wound. Before his eyes it lengthened into a long, twisting gash, dried blood visible between stitches. It took him a moment to realize that the wound had ended, melded almost seamlessly into the corner of a closed mouth. A mouth that twitched under his hand.  
  
In the second that followed, Eli became aware of two things: the steady sound of Tretij's breathing had ceased, leaving him in an eerie silence. One wide eye, naked of its usual orange lens, was staring into his.  
  
The ground dropped from under Eli's feet, and for a moment the boy felt a sickening weightlessness. By the time he realized he was in the air, the wind was being knocked from his lungs against the far wall of the shack. He dropped limply to the floor.  
  
Head spinning, face wet with blood that flowed from his nose without injury, Eli dragged his consciousness back into focus over the pain. Tretij was above him across the room, pressed into the corner where the walls met the ceiling. Several shards of broken glass floated around him, their tips pointed at his companion like the bared teeth of a cornered animal. He shouted something in a shrill voice, and the tiny daggers pulled back in preparation to strike. Eli could not understand the language, but the sense of violation and fear radiating through their link was palpable.  
  
Eli cowered against the wall, arms raised to shield his face.

"What are you-"

Without warning, images flooded into his mind, tearing Eli away from his senses yet again. His own thoughts drowned, and he surfaced in a sea of orange tinted visions of the world. Though his senses were intact, he was severed from them, watching from some place fathoms below himself as someone, something else controlled his body.

A man, scarred face and masked eyes, looking down. Cold hands reached out, and though something inside of him knew to escape, he could not, couldn't find it in himself to even want to. he had to be useful, had to bend to his will, had to please him. The barrier was lifted away, just another of many defenses stripped away from him. Without the mask's soothing pressure, the world exploded with colors that made his head spin, and so many voices- his own thoughts drowned in them, mind choking on all this input. The grim satisfaction radiating from this man dominated all else. _Like me_ , came a thought, _So much like me_. Was it his own thoughts, or the man's? Was there any difference between the two? Fingers reached out, felt as though they sunk into him, and he could do nothing, nothing, nothing-  
  
Eli snapped away from the memory as if waking from a nightmare.

Tretij was now on the floor across from him, glass shards scattered harmlessly to the ground. He hugged his knees, trembling.  
  
"Eli?"  
  
Eli opened his mouth without words to respond with.

Tretij shook in silence for another moment, then retracted into himself and vanished, leaving Eli alone with his discarded jacket and fallen glass.

* * *

Head still reeling from memories that were not his own, Eli gave up on getting any real sleep that night. He emerged as the world around him began to brighten in a new day, to find that the other boy had not gone far after the night's incident.

Tretij floated lazily outside, picking up bits of garbage and debris that littered the ground and tugging them into a slow orbit around himself. A halo of broken glass and trash formed, then scattered as the boy sent them flying against the brick wall.  
  
Eli absentmindedly mimicked Tretij, flinging a dirty beer bottle to join the growing pile of debris at the wall's base.  
  
He could not read minds, but it was clear the other boy was deep within himself, eyes faintly visible and staring into nothingness. After a long moment, he resurfaced, gazing at Eli steadily.

"You want to see?"  
  
The words were less a question than an accusation. A condemnation, that Eli's actions could be mistaken for those of the man who had kept Tretij enslaved. He said nothing in response. He no longer had a choice.  
  
The boys eyes closed behind the mask as the straps unfastened themselves, falling limply to the side. The omnipresent hiss of filtered breathing had suddenly stopped. Tretij's face was open to the light.

The wound was far worse than what little he could see in the darkness. A single line carved through each cheek, as if a macabre extension of his mouth. The stitches closer to his lips appeared clean, professional, while those deeper in were rather sloppy, some caked in dry blood. His lip split, likely a cleft palate that had been minimally treated, tracing up into a nose that appeared broken.  
  
Tretij's eyes reopened, meeting Eli's gaze with eyes that were strikingly blue and tired beyond his years. He grimaced slightly at the blond's stare, mangled face settling into an expression of sheepishness. He exhaled sharply through his nose, expectant.

Eli tore his eyes away to stare intently at his own feet. "That's going to get infected if you don't treat it."  
  
Tretij scoffed.  
  
"Seriously you idiot, it's still _bleeding_. It's a wonder you didn't get something horrid while we were in the jungle." Eli crossed his arms, voice pitifully subdued as he inspected a small rock beneath his boot.  
  
Tretij gave no mercy of a response. Desperate to break the unbearable silence, Eli began to ramble without so much as pausing to process the words coming out of his mouth.

"You're not like him. You survived, he didn't. He was pathetic, anyway." he spat. "Whatever the hell made him look like that.. He ended up like all the rest of those adults. Too weak to do anything himself. He needed you to even stand a chance."  Eli kicked the rock.  
  
"No, you're nothing like that. You went through all of that, and now you're.." He gestured vaguely in Tretij's direction, still looking steadily downwards. He laughed humorlessly.  "It's not like you need anyone, anyways. I still don't get why you're following me around. I don't know why you even came back for..."  
  
Eli silenced himself, trying to pretend that his companion wasn't fully aware of where his mind had begun to wander. Trying to pretend that Tretij hadn't been so painfully close to him at his lowest, having failed so absolutely. That he hadn't seen tears in his eyes as he readied to end his own life. That, in the moment, his wordless persuasion hadn't been the sole reason Eli did not pull the trigger.  
  
He shook his head, as if his thoughts were some persistent fly that could be swatted away.  
  
"You don't even look much like him, anyway." Eli hastily changed the subject.

"That ugly cunt was probably just trying to pretend he didn't look like a waterlogged corpse when he said that. You look...." He tossed equally terrible words around in his head before deciding instead to let the sentence die. Eli clamped his jaw shut. Good _God_ , he needed to shake whatever had gotten into him and stop talking.  
  
After another dreadful eternity of silence, he managed to look back up. The smaller boy was still standing stiff, a bewildered expression on his face. Eli could sense him processing his outburst, translating words and thoughts. Finally, he looked back up at Eli, eyes narrowed in confusion. It was Tretij's turn to break the agonizing stillness.  
  
"Oh."  
  
He then turned around, struggling to put his mask on with trembling hands as if he forgotten his own powers.  
  
Eli felt his own face go hot. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned his head away.

"Shit."

Having reapplied his mask, Tretij idly lifted off the ground, floating near Eli.

"You worry I will, uh, get sick?" he asked as he gestured towards where his face was torn open beneath the mask.  
  
"Do you seriously not know what an infection is?" Eli snarked, grateful for another change in subject.  
  
"Infection." The masked boy repeated flatly.

"When you have an open wound and bacteria gets inside and grows. Makes you sick and all, you know."

Confusion radiated perceptibly from Tretij. He did not know.

"Whatever," Eli sighed. "The details aren't important. We'll swipe some medical supplies on our way out of here."

Tretij nodded in acknowledgment, following Eli's line of thought that it was time to leave this place behind. Gathering their few belongings without any further words exchanged, he two children vanished into the shadow of the trees.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first thing I've written since my fanfiction.net days in junior high, so I hope it's alright! I have a lot of feelings for these kids ;w;


End file.
